"error in rsync protocol data stream"

[Scott Lipcon]

> I know this is late but nobody else appears to have responded.

I did get one email off list from someone having a similar problem,
except he was dealing with Solaris, not BSD machines. 

> A crashing problem on FreeBSD has been found where the rsync zlib library 
> crashes unless it is compiled with gcc -O2.  It sounds like it's your
> Sparc OpenBSD side that's crashing though so I wouldn't think it would
> be the same problem.  At least try it without -z.

Downgrading the FreeBSD (client) side to 2.5.1 (the last binary
package available for FreeBSD - I didn't try anything in between)
fixed the problem.  

I just upgraded back to 2.5.5 (actually 2.5.5_1, from the FreeBSD
Ports tree - the _1 means its been patched I think) and the problem
seems to have disappeared.   Maybe it was a zlib problem dealing with
a specific data pattern or something?   I'll leave it at 2.5.5 and see
if I can reproduce the error in the next few days.

Scott